2999
(Originally written for the Millennium section of Fox News Online: "A snap shot of the future: A brief interview with a science fiction author each month on what they think the year 2999 might look like".)
The worst thing about 2999 is that this interview will still be archived somewhere, and precisely a thousand years from now some curious kid will burrow through the Planet Fox archives, find this, and laugh themselves sick at how pathetically wrong I got it all.
We'll have the storage space and the power to archive everything, everywhere, including ourselves, and cleanly, too. Cover Mercury in solar panels, beam the electricity back, and you can shut down every power plant on Earth and send the vast surplus all over the system. All that free power is just one element of the process that leads to a leisure society, free to get as weird as it wants. We might like the idea of 2999 as a high-tech sf rocket-ride of a place, but it'll mostly look like an ideal Jerry Springer show as envisioned by Dali. A decoded genome -- as gifted to us here, now, by the Human Genome Project -- will eventually lead to a customisable genome, a body you warp on weekends. Just right to indulge in all the weird pleasures and unspeakable taboos invented and remaining a thousand years from now. And why the hell not? It won't kill you. In fact, it's going to be very difficult to find anything that'll kill you, in 2999. Your main problem is going to be not blowing your own head off through boredom -- and thinking of a way to stop your friends from recovering your indestructible Soulcatcher chip and impregnating a perfect aged clone of you with its perfect recording of your mind and all of your memories and experiences before the gunshot, thereby essentially bringing you back to life. Which would really piss you off.
You'll probably only have a small circle of friends in physical proximity, luckily. Earth will be essentially decentralised, a world of small communities. The other worlds of the Solar System will cling to the notion of big cities, still in a colonist frame of mind. Something for the people of Earth, a sublimed culture, to get elitist and superior about. Send snotty letters about living in smelly old cities to your sister at emily@bradbury.mars. And your sexless once-brother at non@huygens.callisto. Both with altered bodies allowing them to walk on altered alien worlds without suits. Strolling across the solar system for the hell of it.
2999: Bigger, weirder, freer, but still essentially about sex, death, power and tourism. Nothing you wouldn't recognise.
Warren Ellis
Southend, England
June 1999
The worst thing about 2999 is that this interview will still be archived somewhere, and precisely a thousand years from now some curious kid will burrow through the Planet Fox archives, find this, and laugh themselves sick at how pathetically wrong I got it all.
We'll have the storage space and the power to archive everything, everywhere, including ourselves, and cleanly, too. Cover Mercury in solar panels, beam the electricity back, and you can shut down every power plant on Earth and send the vast surplus all over the system. All that free power is just one element of the process that leads to a leisure society, free to get as weird as it wants. We might like the idea of 2999 as a high-tech sf rocket-ride of a place, but it'll mostly look like an ideal Jerry Springer show as envisioned by Dali. A decoded genome -- as gifted to us here, now, by the Human Genome Project -- will eventually lead to a customisable genome, a body you warp on weekends. Just right to indulge in all the weird pleasures and unspeakable taboos invented and remaining a thousand years from now. And why the hell not? It won't kill you. In fact, it's going to be very difficult to find anything that'll kill you, in 2999. Your main problem is going to be not blowing your own head off through boredom -- and thinking of a way to stop your friends from recovering your indestructible Soulcatcher chip and impregnating a perfect aged clone of you with its perfect recording of your mind and all of your memories and experiences before the gunshot, thereby essentially bringing you back to life. Which would really piss you off.
You'll probably only have a small circle of friends in physical proximity, luckily. Earth will be essentially decentralised, a world of small communities. The other worlds of the Solar System will cling to the notion of big cities, still in a colonist frame of mind. Something for the people of Earth, a sublimed culture, to get elitist and superior about. Send snotty letters about living in smelly old cities to your sister at emily@bradbury.mars. And your sexless once-brother at non@huygens.callisto. Both with altered bodies allowing them to walk on altered alien worlds without suits. Strolling across the solar system for the hell of it.
2999: Bigger, weirder, freer, but still essentially about sex, death, power and tourism. Nothing you wouldn't recognise.
Warren Ellis
Southend, England
June 1999